Land of the Free, Heinz of the Brave

Last week President Obama ordered a burger with mustard instead of ketchup. This is was offered as proof that our president is an elitist, a socialist and possibly just plain mustarded. Media Matters has tracked the comments under a tab called Dijon Derangement Syndrome here -

While President Obama did not run on a platform of mustard versus ketchup, that alone would have garnered my vote, for I, an adventurous eater; a born and raised Midwesterner - too polite to refuse food placed in front of me, hate ketchup with such a passion that I will not touch anything that has the condiment on it.

Culinary historian Andrew F. Smith wrote book on the subject called Pure Ketchup. Mr. Smith spends hundreds of pages and thousands of footnotes documenting the history of ketchup. Ketchup is a modern version of a centuries old vinegar and spice condiment found in one form or another in almost every food culture: possibly beginning with the Roman fish sauce, garum, a modern analogue is the Thai fish sauce, nam pla.

While now ketchup is red ostensibly from tomatoes, historically that hasn’t always been the case, walnuts and mushrooms have been popular ingredients for ketchups, but the tomato that won out. To the point that in free market loving America, only a condiment thickened by tomatoes can be legally labeled ‘ketchup’.

The story of tomato ketchup hegemony is a classic American story of economy of scale and utility. The tomato, originally shunned in colonial times, first as poisonous and then as a food that aroused passions (like it did in those hot-blooded Mediterranean types), slowly grew to become a major domestic crop in the years following the Civil War. Cheap, easy to grow, abundant and acidic – the latter a trait lent itself to preservation in the burgeoning canning industry. Tomato ketchup was the byproduct of canned tomatoes: Bits, pieces, seeds and juices being cooked down into a heavily spiced sauce, making a marketable product out of otherwise unwanted parts of the tomato.

By the turn of the 19th century, ketchup was already the most popular sauce in the country. A survey in 1915 counted over 800 different brands of tomato ketchup. Nearly 100 years later that that number has been whittled down to Heinz and maybe a dozen nationally distributed brands. While selection is down, intake is nearly universal, the condiment is found in 97% of homes, each American consuming on average about 3 bottles of tomato ketchup a year.

But not in the Saucykitchen, here it is thought of derisively as red corn syrup, a cloying sweet flavor that is excluded from the pantry because it overwhelms all food rather than helps build flavor. But that is just me, people who take food seriously aren’t exclusively anti-ketchup, Professor Dale Huffman points out ketchup, “is tart and slightly acidic, so it counteracts the fatty buildup…from meat and fried potatoes”. If that commentary is too practical, especially coming from an elitist academic, researcher Ernest Dichter deconstructs for us; theorizing ketchup satisfies our hunter instincts by claiming, “Pouring ketchup on cooked meat makes it look raw.”

As for President Obama, I respect your decision to taste the flavor of the burger rather than drown it in ketchup and acknowledge if it wouldn’t have been ketchup it would have been something else – Although, I am curious how ordering a big bowl of Pho would have been commented on, to see what parallels the chattering classes could have drawn between tripe, purple basil, noodles, chopsticks and democracy.

While its funny to listen to the talk radio types and the cable news people, a group of elite earners (who most likely aren’t spending their paychecks on drive-thru food and iceberg lettuce); people who simultaneously espouse the greatness of the market for its ability to offer a myriad of choices and actually worry (or just constantly talk) about Obama style socialism - these people are surprisingly very Maoist about the proper way to order a burger. Here there is no room for individualism, only burgers with ketchup or renounce your citizenship.